Patrick White

Want To Write Or Be Written Poem by Patrick White

Want to write or be written. Whatever comes first. Want to slide down a Martian sand dune like a hockey puck of dry ice etching clawmarks into a copper plate as if I were trying to cling to something I couldn’t get a grip on like a snowmanthawing. A mirror melting. I want to plough the desert in an hourglass into a Zen gardenwhere the stones flourish like weeds. I want to swim in the wavelengths of my own mirages in a month of heat, but there’s a small, nasty voice like a deerfly buzzing the wheelhouse in my headthat bites like a cattle prod of conditioned guilt because I’d rather write a poem than fill out the deadpan forms of the world. All those deathmasks plastered over our faces like papier mache over the years just to prove we’ve got some kind of nonrefundable identity.

Do this, do this, do this, and then, this. As if business had become the sign of a healthy spiritual life. Curse the opportunistic careerism of our pettiness. I’d rather hide like a tiger in the stripes and shadows that are cast upon him by the busy, busy villagers tying a judas-goat to the stake of an hour hand, forgetting that time’s a waterclock, not a traffic cop, to draw it out like fire from a moonrock. Tears of blood flaring like the stamens of a matchbook brief as a poppy blooming like a solar prominence. No auroras in its wake. No scarves of light lingering on the air like the fragrance of a mystic insightinto the humbling depths of our own ugliness and ignorance.Que sais je. The clearest of all corneas. The Kepler of all third eyes in orbit around some guru of a shepherd moon.

Life’s a mystery, not a question. Don’t expect me to answer that. You can autofill your own blank. Or try to second-guess your way out of the abyss you wander in as if emptiness were a labyrinth you had to follow your daily bread through like the crumbs of the dreams you left behind as cluesto where your freedom went when you closed the windows on what was once as wonderfully useless as a sunset about you.

Whatever it costs. Whether they cut me downand make my skin into wallets to cover the expense of hanging me from a heritage lamp post like a flowerpotnesting in midair from the bough of a one-armed tree, hemorrhaging violet petunias, I will still heretically insist on how crucial it is just to drift down your own mindstream as if your only purpose in life were not to have one that moored you like a lifeboat to a long walk off a short pier. You can sing to the stars or you can call for help. You can water plants like green lanterns in the window waiting for love to hand out starmaps to your stem cells as if you only direction in life were some kind of photosynthesis.

It’s a dangerous calling to live creatively free. There are always hounds barking in the distance, coydogs yelping after the magic rabbit in the hat, deerflies trying to land like kamikazes on the flightdecks of your carriers in Pearl Harbour whether they’re out to sea or not, low-flying topedoes released like snakes from the claws of sea-eagles trying to train them to bite other people. Good luck in the snakepit. I’m out of it like an emergency exit.

I’m not into mindwatching from a crow’s nestfor any sign of trouble on the horizon. I’m not into crawling across my thresholds like the rungs of a burning ladder for the upwardly mobile. I’d rather fall toward paradise than cling to it like mordant ivy on a church. And truth to tell, I’d rather search than find. Build my house on the waters of life than a gravestone that covets my relics like a bone-box in a Gothic cave.

Water’s always on the move like a true pilgrim following its own thought waves like tree rings in the heartwood of a cross of terebinthmany springs have hung the fruits of life upon. Peace be upon the pilot lights of the prophets who taught the spirit how to make it through another night without freezing to death in the firepits of cold zodiacs feathered in shrouds of ash cloth.Rites of passage trying to thrive like fish in the desert around the great artificial barrier reefs of the moonthat ossify like dental plack and barnacles on the decks of our spiritual shipwrecks in the dead seas of life we’re walking on like root fires of our own radiance in the housewells of light.

Whether you make an ashtray or a body castout of your starmud, no matter, the dragons of life burn no less hot in their urns than they do in the furnaces and kilns of the stars whatever prayer wheel they’re being turned upon like the inconceivable embodied like the sun, the moon, and Venus, in the false idols of visionary insightsthat shadow the ineffable with the simulacra of the painterly senses that know of their own accord, like unsuccessful saints, who better? - -there is no metaphorfor the light upon light, the mind upon its own waters, until your seeing isn’t discoloured by the eyes you’re looking into as if they were brighter than your own.